USA Patriot Act

News about USA Patriot Act, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.

Chronology of Coverage

Mar. 16, 2012

Sens Ron Wyden and Mark Udall draft a letter to Attorney Gen Eric H Holder Jr criticizing a top-secret intelligence operation that they say stretches the powers granted by the Patriot Act to alarming lengths; both men are part of a handful of Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee that have grown increasingly vocal about dangers posed by executive surveillance powers; Justice Department has argued that disclosing information about its interpretation of the Patriot Act could cause significant damage to national security. MORE

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French spy agencies will have more powers to bug and track would-be Islamist attackers and authorities will be able to force Internet providers to monitor suspicious behavior under a draft law unveiled on Thursday.

At the Obama administration’s request, House leaders revised a bill that limits the government’s bulk collection of phone records, spurring several civil liberties groups to withdraw support for the bill.

December 8, 2013, Sunday

The National Security Agency is tracking the movements of hundreds of millions of cellphones in an effort to find suspicious travel patterns or activities by intelligence targets, according to documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden.

Multimedia

In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the government has declassified two previously Top Secret rulings from May and August 2007 by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The disclosure filled in a missing link in the history of the evolving legality of the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. The government previously declassified key rulings from January 2007 and April 2007revealing an internal dispute on the court as the Bush administration struggled to put the program on a firmer legal footing. Congress legalized the program with the Protect America Act in August 2007, ending the efforts to fit it into the existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The New York Times, the Justice Department has declassified additional portions of these two inspector general reports about the government’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is the legal basis for the once-secret National Security Agency program that systematically collects records in bulk about Americans’ domestic and international phone calls.

As a senator, Barack Obama was a critic of the Bush administration, saying it cast a “false choice” between liberty and security. As he engages in his own surveillance efforts, he has spoken of finding a balance.